Perhaps that has something to do, too, with the reason I, Jane American, want people in the Sudan to be free and those killing them to be put out of power…even if it’s not something that’s directly affecting my everyday life. I sound like Miss America, and it’s certainly true that I can’t and won’t spend my day thinking about what happened but, “I don’t care about Egyptians” sounds unnecessarily callous. ~Kathryn Jean Lopez, The Corner

Maybe Derb’s line was a bit blunt (though the truth often sounds callous to drippy sentimentalists), but what is worse than callous is the affectation and display of empty compassion. In some vast, universal sense, I would like to see killing stop in Sudan and elsewhere, but the one conflict that does directly and immediately concern me is the one in Iraq because my fellow-countrymen (and we are already at the breaking-point of abstract fellowship here) are fighting there.

Do I pretend that I am really that personally concerned about a given group of people in a war in Sudan? No. Am I remotely sorry that a great many people have died in the Red Sea today? Of course, much as any decent person is generally sorry to hear of terrible accidents or unexpected deaths, but not terribly sorry and not in a way that will affect me an hour from now. If I were particularly disturbed by this, I would have to make myself feel generally upset for every traffic death and murder that takes place in the world, and no normal person will or even can manufacture compassion for that many people.

And the key word is manufacture, because there is no natural affinity that would summon the compassion without a concentrated act of will–I do not need to manufacture compassion for my family or neighbours, because their sufferings directly concern me and there may be something meaningful I can do for them. Wishing fellow humans well and even praying for them because we are all human is about as shallow as it gets. In my old church in Santa Fe after the Beslan massacre, we held a pannykhida for the murdered victims, because there was some obvious and clear connection between those Russians, many of whom if not all were Orthodox, and ourselves as Russian Orthodox. That simply makes a lot more sense than having a service for the victims of the South Asian tsunami, with whom we had only the most general connection. With the grace of a saint, it might be possible to have genuine compassion for suffering everywhere, but I am not so ridiculous as to pretend that I can do the works of a saint with saccharine humanitarianism.